Comparison of Final Fracture Extraction Techniques for Interrupted In situ Tensile Tests of Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymers

To develop and optimize advanced composite materials such as glass fiber reinforced polymers (GFRPs) is an important topic for various application areas. To inspect mechanical properties of GFRPs, material engineers use interrupted in situ tensile tests. During these tests, a specimen is scanned multiple times in an industrial computed tomography (CT) device under increasing tensile loads, starting from no load until finally the fracture of the specimen occurs. In this work, we focus on the final step of the interrupted in situ tensile test, which is scanned when the specimen is completely losing its structural integrity in the final fracture zone. The defects occurring in the first loading stages merge and ultimately form the final fracture. For this reason, conventional techniques tend to generate error prone final fracture regions or surfaces and thus require more advanced algorithms for extraction. The main contribution of this paper is the comparison of different techniques for extracting the final fracture. In the comparison, we outline advantages and drawbacks of the presented techniques relative to each other.